5 gut checks before the stock market’s opening bell

By Shawn Langlois

Flickr/jurvetson

Good morning.

With earnings season just about all wrapped up, the summertime stench of a stagnant stock market is really starting to waft across Wall Street.

There’ll be a few more data points worth watching than there were last week, like retail sales numbers and initial jobless claims, but there’s nothing that particularly jumps off the screen. Which means we’re left with more taper talk. At this point, $100 will get you get you $200 if you accurately wager that the cash spigot will start to tighten in September, according to Paddy Power.

Feeling a bit more risk-on? That same $100 will fetch you $50,000 if Julian Assange leaves the Ecuadorian Embassy via jet pack.

While the Irish bookmaker isn’t putting any odds on whether the S&P 500 will retake 1,700, more and more analysts are predicting that level will be in the rear-view mirror by the end of 2013. When the year started, nobody on Wall Street saw it as a real possibility. Standing in its way is the dreaded Hindenburg Omen, which reared its head four times during last week’s weak market showing.

Ill-fated balloon or not, stocks are drifting further away from that number in premarket trading, while gold is looking at another in a series of positive trading days.

The chart of the day: It’s the beginning of the end for Walter White, and that could spell trouble for the stock that seems to have benefited mightily from what ChessNWine calls “the best production on television of all-time.” He said it’s “poetic” that the AMC Networks
/quotes/zigman/5431351/quotes/nls/amcxAMCX chart is showing a bearish rising-wedge pattern at the same time as “Breaking Bad” hits the home stretch. “A weekly close below $61 would be strong evidence of a topping-out process at hand,” he wrote.

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Need to Know (NTK) guides investors to the most important, insightful items required to chart a course ahead of each trading day. Anchored by lead writer Shawn Langlois, NTK will sift through the fire hose of news, commentary and data, from traditional and non-traditional sources, and extract what’s most essential. You can start reading NTK here as it begins publishing at approximately 6:30 a.m. ET, or sign up here to get a version in your email box every morning at approximately 8:45. a.m. ET.